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Friday, November 30, 2012

`His Stomach Was a Strong One'

“I
am reading once more the work I have read oftener than any other prose work in
our language [ATale of a Tub]. I cannot bring to my recollection the number of
copies I have given away, chiefly to young Catholic ladies. I really believe I
converted one by it unintentionally. What a writer! not the most imaginative or
the most simple, not Bacon or Goldsmith, had the power of saying more forcibly
or completely whatever he meant to say!”

The
writer is Walter Savage Landor, as reported by John Forster in his 1876 biography
of the epigrammist, who captures the violent clarity of Swift’s language. In
verse and prose, Swift arranges his words with seeming artlessness, like stones
in a cold stream, without filigree. As logical as a Euclidian proof, they seem more
forcefully there than the words of almost
any other writer (the others are also Irish). “Proper words in proper
places,” Swift writes, “make the true definition of a style.”

In
1732, Swift published “An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin” (The Prose Works
of Jonathan Swift, Vol. XII, Irish
Tracts 1728-1733), a pamphlet that begins rather charmingly with a
description of the calls of street traders in the Irish capital, where Swift
was born. The writer claims the cries are a nuisance because they cannot be
readily understood, and that “our Law-makers” ought to regulate such speech so
that “a plain Christian Hearer may comprehend what is cryed”:

“I
would advise all new Comers to look out at their Garret Windows, and there see
whether the Thing that is cryed be Tripes,
or Flummery, Buttermilk, or Cowheels.”

Seamlessly,
Swift moves on to his real subject, the insidious intrusion of politics into
private life, and does so in a manner we recognize as quintessentially
Swiftian; that is, scatologically:

“Every
Person who walks the Streets, must needs observe the immense Number of human Excrements
at the Doors and Steps of waste Houses, and at the Sides of every dead Wall;
for which the disaffected Party hath assigned a very false and malicious Cause.
They would have it, that these Heaps were laid there privately by British Fundaments, to make the World
believe, that our Irish Vulgar do
daily eat and drink; and, consequently, that the Clamour of Poverty among us,
must be false, proceeding only from Jacobites
and Papists. They would confirm this,
by pretending to observe, that a British Anus
being more narrowly perforated than one of our own Country; and many of these Excrements
upon a strict View appearing Copple-crowned, with a Point like a Cone or Pyramid,
are easily distinguished from the Hibernian,
which lie much flatter, and with less Continuity.”

The
author of the pamphlet reports he has consulted “an eminent Physician” who was
“pleased to make Trial with each of his Fingers, by thrusting them into the Anus of several Persons of both
Nations.” He could then, “by smelling each Finger, distinguish the Hibernian Excrement from the British, and was not above twice
mistaken in an Hundred Experiments; upon which he intends very soon to publish
a learned Dissertation.”

And
that’s not the worst, or best, of it. Swift extends his logic one sickening
step further, but you’ll have to read the pamphlet for yourself. In his
introduction to a selection of Swift’s poems, C.H. Sisson writes: “There is no
mincing matters for him. His stomach was a strong one.” No one else has made cloacal
revulsion so effective a tool of politics, or anti-politics. Swift was born on
this date, Nov. 30, in 1667.